The spectral collocation method for efficiently solving PDEs with fractional Laplacian

We derive a spectral collocation approximation to the fractional Laplacian operator based on the Riemann-Liouville fractional derivative operators on a bounded domain Ω = a, b]. Corresponding matrix representations of (?△) ^α/2 for α ∈ (0,1) and α ∈ (1,2) are obtained. A space-fractional advection-dispersion equation is then solved to investigate the numerical performance of this method under various choices of parameters. It turns out that the proposed method has high accuracy and is efficient for solving these space-fractional advection-dispersion equations when the forcing term is smooth.